Our production

We are French bee-keepers. Our whole production is located on a perimeter of 10 km around our town, Giroussens, which is a little village in the district of Tarn, in the south west of France, close to Toulouse and Albi, the main cities in our area.

There are several agricultural productions dominating the area. They are major cultivations, such as: straw cereals, irrigated corns, sunflowers and rapeseed. Besides, we also find more specialize ones. In fact, this large variety of cultivations is the result of the diversified flora which is composed of hazel trees, willows, plum trees, wild cherries, acacias, chequer-trees, cistus, blackberry bushes, sweet chestnut trees, marjoram, trees of heaven and basket flowers. However, for the past 20 years, these lands have suffered from drought which limited the interest for beekeeping. Even if the pollen production is quantitatively modest, it is still very interesting for its diversity and continuity over seasons.

Since 2006, Philippe and I are working together on the breeding of queen bees. Our concentration is mainly on the Buckfast breed. As well, we produce and commercialise:

overwintering of swarms

virgin queens

mated queens

inseminated queens

Number of colonies:

Our number of colonies fluctuates constantly depending of the swarms’ production and our sales. We overwinter a little more than 1500 colonies:

150 Dadant 10-frame hives,

800 Dadant 6-frame little hives,

300 divisible hives,

450 nuclei Maxi +,
Each season, to produce mated queen bees, we fill up 1000 polystyrene nuclei “Kieler Begattungskasten”. Afterwards, every winter, we overwinter a few of them.

Level of production:

We produce annually over 12 000 royal cells and put on the market approximately:

1000 swarms (500 overwintered swarms + 500 swarms of the year)

4500 naturally mated queens

20 inseminated queens (from the 200 produced yearly)

Development of our activities:

Since the arrival of Fabienne and Xavier, in 2012, our production significantly expanded. In fact, the output of many kinds of honey (all-flower honey, sweet chestnut honey, mountain honey, forest honey…) became for us an important activity. Meanwhile, we’ve developed our market on the hive’s products toward the GMS on short-circuit sales.